Early life in the Pfaffenwinkel

A mining town south of Munich

Fact

Peißenberg is a market municipality in the district of Weilheim-Schongau, roughly 60 kilometres south-west of Munich, in the foothills between the Ammer valley and the Alps. For generations its identity was bound up with the extraction of pitch coal, mined there from the nineteenth century until the pit closed in 1971 — the year after Alexander Dobrindt was born. The town’s miners’ association, the Knappenverein, keeps that heritage alive; a 2013 portrait of Dobrindt in the trade publication VerkehrsRundschau listed him among its members, and also described him as a repeated club champion of the local shooting club.

The surrounding area is known as the Pfaffenwinkel, the “priests’ corner”, a name that refers to the density of monasteries and pilgrimage churches in the region. The district itself was created in its present form in 1972, when Bavaria’s territorial reform merged the former districts of Weilheim and Schongau.

Analysis

The combination of an industrial working-class tradition and a deeply Catholic rural hinterland is characteristic of the milieu in which the CSU built its post-war dominance. It is also the electorate Dobrindt has addressed throughout his career, in which he has repeatedly presented himself as a representative of the Bavarian regions rather than of the metropolitan centres.

Growing up in CSU Bavaria

Fact

Dobrindt’s childhood and adolescence fell entirely within the long period in which the CSU governed Bavaria alone: the party held an absolute majority in the Bavarian Landtag from 1962 until 2008. From 1978 to 1988 the state was led by Minister-President Franz Josef Strauß, the most prominent CSU politician of the post-war era, who was also the Union’s candidate for chancellor in 1980.

The 1980s brought major debates to Bavaria — about nuclear energy and the planned reprocessing plant at Wackersdorf, about Germany’s place in NATO during the Euromissile controversy, and about the transformation of a largely agricultural state into a centre of high-technology industry. In autumn 1989, the year he completed his Abitur, the Berlin Wall fell; Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990.

Analysis

There is no public record of Dobrindt attributing his political choices to any single event from this period, and this profile does not speculate. What can be said is that he joined the Junge Union in 1986 and the CSU in 1990 at a time when the party was both the self-evident governing force in Bavaria and a confident actor in federal politics.

School years in Weilheim

Fact

Dobrindt attended the Gymnasium in Weilheim in Oberbayern, the district town a short distance north of Peißenberg, and passed his Abitur there in 1989. In the autumn of the same year he began studying sociology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich — the subject of the next chapter.

In 1986, at the age of sixteen, he joined the Junge Union, the joint youth organisation of the CDU and CSU. According to his German Wikipedia biography he went on to chair the Junge Union in the Weilheim-Schongau district from 1990 to 1997 and served as deputy chairman for Upper Bavaria from 1993 to 1997.

Roots that remained

Unlike many federal politicians, Dobrindt never moved his political base. He sat on the Peißenberg market council from 1996 to 2011 and on the Weilheim-Schongau district council from 1996 to 2018, chaired the CSU in Peißenberg and, from 2009, in the district. The Weilheim constituency he has won at every federal election since 2002 includes his home town.

He is married and has one son. Beyond what he and official biographies have made public, this profile does not report on his private life.